who let pleir drive the bus?
something in pleir's introductory post caught my eye.
@mcpleir (their Twitter handle) is a member of the event staff for Decayed and Decrepit. as we know by now, there've been tons of ARG elements in the introduction/promotion of this event, and this post from pleir announcing their involvement in DaD is no different.
here is their full tweet:
that .html filename under their role is as follows: uwdqvo_bweizla_xizilqam.html.
running the first part (sans ".html") through a caesar cipher (shifted by 8) produces this:
moving_towards_paradise
i downloaded the image itself and ran it through a metadata checker and saw... this?
put this through a cipher identifer, saw it was hexadecimal code:
and here i hit a total wall. running this through hexadecimal ciphers, trying to translate it to binary code or english, produced total gibberish.
until i saw this article on the ciphertext analyzer website:
"shannon entropy". this is a term i've only heard in my life once before.
on the faux-wikipedia site created by the Decayed and Decrepit event staff.
clicking the link in the wikipedia page leads nowhere:
but the "shannon entropy" of the hexadecimal code is 4.65.
i have more questions than answers at this point. shannon entropy is just a statistics formula--an indication that the hexadecimal code in the image metadata is indeed a code (and not randomly generated). but why does it get a shoutout on the wikipedia page? is that the creators telling us on a meta-level to keep an eye out for ARG elements--or is shannon entropy significant to the Decayed and Decrepit event?
and what does it have to do with moving_towards_paradise or the html string? we didn't even get into the .html file.
more to follow as i continue to invesigate. help wanted.